I looked at my son, who could do little more than roll his body from side to side, and thought, sure, I’ll get right on that.

At the six-month checkup, the pediatrician issued another warning, this one more insistent. She detailed the things we needed to do: install soft rounded bumpers on all the sharp-edged furniture, lock up cabinets, plug the electrical sockets, move anything dangerous out of baby’s reach. The list went on and on.

At this point, my son was sitting up on his own, but he was still pretty much stuck wherever we put him. And it’s not as though our 900-square-foot apartment offered much room for him to get in trouble. We were generally within an arm’s length of him at any moment, and we didn’t have stairs, fireplaces, a swimming pool, exposed wiring or any other blatant hazards.

I started to think, as the pediatrician continued to ply me with brochures on child safety and as I read posts from frantic mothers on a local online mommy forum, that this whole baby-proofing thing was a bit of a racket, designed to scare already worried parents into spending big bucks on cheap plastic.

I felt the same way when I realized we’d be spending at least $150 every year on new car seats, from rear-facing infant carriers to rear-facing toddler seats, then to forward-facing car seats, and then to booster seats with backrests and then ones without backrests, and so on until the state’s car seat law no longer applies, which I’m pretty sure is when our kid turns 18 or gets his own car, whichever comes first.

Child safety, after all, is big business. All those little plastic devices rake in $2.7 billion a year and they’ve spawned a cottage industry of babyproof consultants, like Boo Boo Busters, founded in Manhattan Beach.

For $75, a Boo Boo Busters consultant will point out all the dangers in your home, knocking a few bucks off the price if you spend at least $350 on their safety products. Sure, it sounds like a lot, but what kind of monster puts a price on their child’s safety?

Still, my husband and I were slow to get on it.

When my son became increasingly adept at scooting from place to place, I came home from work one day to find covers on all the electrical outlets and corner cushions on the coffee table. “Just a few things,” my mother said, sheepishly, “just in case.”

And then one day, our kid became mobile. Really mobile.

Almost overnight, he was crawling everywhere, in and out of the dining room chairs, down the hallway, across the kitchen floor. He pulled himself to stand on anything remotely three-dimensional, even things clearly not meant to hold his weight, like Kleenex boxes and pillows and our legs.

Even worse, he displayed an uncanny ability to destroy things. The more expensive, the better. He ripped the labels off his father’s precious home-theater speakers. He bit through the remote control and drooled into the opening.

One day, he grabbed hold of his crib mobile, pulled with all his might and cracked it clean in half. Then he danced around the crib with it, crushing the fabric canopy and knocking the poor little moons against the rails like some sort of baby hunting prize.

Every new object got smashed and banged and chewed on, and our son found ever more creative ways to dismantle our house, piece by piece.

It was as though he blamed us for those first few months of limited mobility and now he wanted revenge.

Suddenly, my husband and I realized the importance of babyproofing: to protect our stuff. And as our son demolished the valuables we had so painstakingly acquired through our 20s, we now had powerful motivation to get started.

So we’ve moved the most breakable objects higher than 3 feet and keep the new remote control out of reach. And we now have one of those homes that befuddles childless couples with its esoteric system of cabinet locks and latches and plugs.

I’m still not convinced we need to spend hundreds of dollars on high-priced safety gear or overpaid consultants, but I suppose it’s worth doing all we can to protect our only child. Not to mention, our stuff.

Former Daily Breeze reporter Renee Moilanen is a freelance writer based in Redondo Beach. Her column runs Saturdays. She can be reached at rkmoilanen@yahoo.com.

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